Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @02:17PM
from the can't-believe-this-didn't-work dept.

52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.

Some plans are so foolish that it makes you wonder if there's actual brain damage involved. For one thing, even if his original plan worked, he'd still be a million in the hole and two, there's no way to hide something like that from the authorities for any amount of time.

According to the article at the register [theregister.co.uk]. He included his email addres and phone while talking about how evil and vindictive he is. He either didn't have the capacity to make rational decisions or never intended to succeed. Since he was also already in debt 1.2 mil and made his demand precisely 4x his life insurance premium that he was unhappy with I'm thinking it was a little of both.

Firefox won't block popups triggered by a click, presumably because it assumes you wanted the popup. The site does exactly that should you click on any empty space. NoScript will naturally nail it, though.

Ok, So I got a funny mod above, then I read the article. This guy is $1.2 mil in debt and was provoked by 'becoming "dissatisfied" with the performance of his own universal life insurance policy.' That's sad. But wait, theres more:

1. He wasn't going to spam their email servers, he was going to spam the world to smear their name "drag your company name and reputation, through the muddiest waters imaginable".

2. Looks like he wanted a resolution to the problems he was having because he felt they where doing him wrong. A little different than pure extortion. Basically a "You do me right, or I will tell the whole world of how your wrong me"

He started it would cost them millions to undo what he would do to the companies reputation and that he was very mad at them. This may not be as clear cut a case as the summary makes it.